Author: Ariane DeVereWord count: 221Rating: PGWarnings: If you’ve not seen Season 2 this won’t make much sense. That said, there are no major spoilers for Season 2

By any other name

He has always hated his name. If he didn’t have an irritating but unavoidable sense of loyalty to his parents’ memory, he would have changed it decades ago. His classmates at school always sneered at how unusual the name was, and his brother was no help at all, simply quoting that stupid Shakespearean line about a rose smelling as sweet. Idiot. You’d think that, being lumbered with the same problem, he would sympathise with him. But it makes no sense to him: he won’t ever forgive his parents for bestowing such an annoying name on him, so why couldn’t he ever bring himself to change it and feel happier with himself?

But now he has to disappear; to vanish from the world and leave no trace of himself behind. At long last he has a good reason to change his name, a reason that even his late parents and his oh-so-very-annoyingly-alive brother will understand and forgive him for.

He looks down at his hand in bemusement as he realises that it’s shaking while he dials the number.

“Hello,” he says when someone answers at the other end. “I need to speak to one of your reporters, please.”

The voice asks for his name, and an excited shudder runs through his body as he opens his mouth.

“My name ... is Richard Brook.”

**************

Author’s Note: So this one resonates with me. I’ve despised my own name all my life – can’t explain why. It wasn’t an unusual name like Sherlock, Mycroft or Moriarty but I hated it. It didn’t feel right on me, and even as a youngster I took on the name of my favourite TV character at the time – at least inside my own head. The name changed over time but when I was eleven I read the name ‘Callie’ in a book and fell in love with it immediately. Later I decided that if I was ever going to change my name for real, I was going to change the surname as well, and at the age of fifteen – for reasons too complicated to explain – decided that my new surname would be ‘Sullivan’. And finally, at the ripe old age of thirty-five (fifteen years ago), I made the change official.

My Mum never really understood but, bless her heart, wanted me to be happy and – to my surprise – called me Callie from that day on, only occasionally and accidentally slipping into my original name. And when I started calling myself Ariane DeVere for fic-writing and macro-making purposes, she just nodded and accepted that too.